Fugitive in a 2006 Ecoterrorism Case Is Still Licensed to Fly by the F.A.A.

By MATTHEW L. WALD

Published: August 19, 2009

EDITORS' NOTE APPENDED

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is offering a $50,000 reward for a Seattle man it says is a domestic terrorist. But that has not kept him from keeping his pilot's license or from trying to sell his airplane online, apparently because the Transportation Security Administration has not compared the F.B.I.'s wanted list with the Federal Aviation Administration's list of licensed pilots.

The pilot, Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 31, was indicted with 10 other people in January 2006, in Eugene, Ore., on charges that they committed arson, destroyed an electric tower and other acts of domestic terrorism. Credit for those acts and others were claimed by two groups, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front.

The F.B.I. says Mr. Dibee may have fled to Syria.

According to F.A.A. records, Mr. Dibee still owns a single-engine airplane, a 1977 Grumman/American Cheetah. He is also trying to sell the plane on the Internet for $39,000.

The New York Times learned that Mr. Dibee still has his license and his plane from a database processing company, Safe Banking Systems, which in June released the names of six other people with F.A.A. licenses who had been charged or convicted of terrorism crimes or otherwise were considered a threat to national security.

After the names were released, the Transportation Security Administration suspended the six licenses and said it would take steps to weed out other pilots who posed security risks from among the nearly four million names in the F.A.A.'s public database.

Last week, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee and its aviation subcommittee sent a letter to the Transportation Security Administration and the F. A. A. asking whether the two agencies were reconsidering which lists to use to match against the list of pilots. The letter referred to ''apparent weaknesses in the existing vetting system.''

The Transportation Security Administration did not provide details on whether it is doing anything different since the disclosure of the six cases.

Laura J. Brown, a spokeswoman for the F.A.A., which rescinds licenses when told to by the Transportation Security Administration, said her agency had, in fact, revoked ''several'' licenses since June, though she declined to say how many.

The Transportation Security Administration has been hampered in identifying some individuals because of variations in how their names were transliterated from Arabic. For example, the list that Safe Banking Services published in June included the man in prison for blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The man, who at the time was a licensed aircraft dispatcher, was listed on his F.B.I. wanted poster as Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, but by the F.A.A. as Abdelbaset Ali Elmegrahi.

But Mr. Dibee was born in Seattle, and the F.B.I. poster and F.A.A. records spelled his name the same way and had the same birthday for him, Nov. 10, 1967.

With such a straightforward match, David M. Schiffer, president of Safe Banking Systems, said it was ''highly unlikely'' that, despite assurances in June, the Transportation Security Administration was matching the publicly available F.B.I. list with the publicly available F.A.A. list.

Through Ms. Brown, the F.A.A. spokeswoman, the Transportation Security Administration said it could not comment on specific cases because it might ''jeopardize ongoing investigations and/or violate the privacy rights of the individual.'' Ms. Brown did not elaborate.

The Transportation Security Administration said that while it did not routinely consult the F.B.I. wanted list, it used ''a more robust list that incorporates the F.B.I. list, as well as many other lists.'' The agency said that it ''continuously assesses vetting performance and adjusts its vetting engines accordingly.''

Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, making it part of the Homeland Security Department and responsible for reviewing the list of people holding F.A.A. licenses, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the F.A.A. was stripped of most security responsibility.

The four senators who sent a letter to the Transportation Security Administration and the F.A.A. last Friday were John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Commerce Committee; Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the committee's ranking Republican member; Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the aviation subcommittee; and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the subcommittee's ranking Republican member.

The letter said the two agencies had agreed to a 90-day plan to improve their performance.

According to officials familiar with current procedure, the F.A.A. checks daily for changes to the Transportation Security Administration's No-Fly List and Selectee Flight List, and matches that against the list of licensed pilots; and once a week, the names of new student pilots are checked against those lists. But the quality of those lists is not clear.

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Editors' Note: August 25, 2009, Tuesday
An article on Wednesday about people who hold Federal aviation licenses despite having criminal records cited the example of Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, who is under indictment and wanted by the F.B.I. but whose pilot's license has not been revoked.

In its first sentence, the article said this was ''apparently because the Transportation Security Administration has not compared the F.B.I.'s wanted list with the Federal Aviation Administration's list of licensed pilots.'' The Times learned of this and similar cases from a database processing company that did compare the two lists and revealed the names of license holders, and the article quoted an official of the company who said that it was highly improbable that the government was matching lists. The article went on to report that the Transportation Security Administration said that it did compare lists, but could not comment on an individual case because doing so might ''jeopardize ongoing investigations and/or violate the privacy rights of the individual.''

The article did not give sufficient weight to the possibility that a continuing investigation might be an explanation for the government's leaving a name on the pilots' list.